John von Neumann and von Neumann Architecture for Computers
(1945)

John von Neumann (born Johann von Neumann) was a child prodigy,
born into a banking family in Budapest, Hungary. When only six
years old he could divide eight-digit numbers in his head. He
received his early education in Budapest, under the tutelage of
M. Fekete, with whom he published his first paper at the age of
18.

Entering the University of Budapest in 1921, he studied Chemistry,
moving his base of studies to both Berlin and Zurich before receiving
his diploma in 1925 in Chemical Engineering. He returned to his
first love of mathematics in completing his doctoral degree in
1928. He quickly gained a reputation in set theory, algebra, and
quantum mechanics. At a time of political unrest in central Europe,
he was invited to visit Princeton University in 1930, and when
the Institute for Advanced Studies (IAS) was founded there in
1933, he was appointed to be one of the original six Professors
of Mathematics, a position which he retained for the remainder
of his life.

In the second half of the 1930s the main part of von Neumann's
publications, written partly in collaboration with F.J. Murray,
was on "rings of operators" (now called Neumann algebras).
Of all his work, these concepts will quite probably be remembered
the longest. Currently it is one of the most powerful tools in
the study of quantum physics. An important outgrowth of rings
of operators is "continuous geometry." Von Neumann saw
that what really determines the character of the dimensional structure
of a space is the group of rotations that the structure allows.
The groups of rotations associated with rings of operators make
possible the description of space with continuously varying dimensions.

About 20 of von Neumann's 150 papers are in physics; the rest
are distributed more or less evenly among pure mathematics (mainly
set theory, logic, topological group, measure theory, ergodic
theory, operator theory, and continuous geometry) and applied
mathematics (statistics, numerical analysis, shock waves, flow
problems, hydrodynamics, aerodynamics, ballistics, problems of
detonation, meteorology, and two nonclassical aspects of applied
mathematics, games and computers). His publications show a break
from pure to applied research around 1940.

At the instigation and sponsorship of Oskar Morganstern, von Neumann
and Kurt Gödel became US citizens in time for their clearance
for wartime work. There is an anecdote which tells of Morganstern
driving them to their immigration interview, after having learned
about the US Constitution and the history of the country. On the
drive there Morganstern asked them if they had any questions which
he could answer. Gödel replied that he had no questions but
he had found some logical inconsistencies in the Constitution
that he wanted to ask the Immigration officers about. Morganstern
strongly recommended that he not ask questions, just answer them!

During 1936 through 1938 Alan Turing was a visitor at the
Institute and completed a Ph.D. dissertation under von Neumann's
supervision. Von Neumann invited Turing to stay on at the Institute
as his assistant but he preferred to return to Cambridge; a year
later Turing was involved in war work at Bletc ar This
visit occurred shortly after Turing's publication of his 1934
paper "On Computable Numbers with an Application to the Entscheidungs-problem"
which involved the concepts of logical design and the universal
machine. It must be concluded that von Neumann knew of Turing's
ideas, though whether he applied them to the design of the I Machine ten years later is questionable.

During World War II, he was much in demand as a consultant to
the armed forces and to civilian agencies. His two main contributions
were his espousal of the implosion method for bringing nuclear
fuel to explosion and his participation in the development of
the hydrogen bomb.

Von Neumann's interest in computers differed from that of his
peers by his quickly perceiving the application of computers to
applied mathematics for specific problems, rather than their mere
application to the development of tables. During the war, von
Neumann's expertise in hydrodynamics, ballistics, meteorology,
game theory, and statistics, was put to good use in several projects.

This work led him to consider the use of mechanical devices for
computation, and although the stories about von Neumann imply
that his first computer encounter was with the ENIAC, in
fact it was with Howard Aiken's Harvard Mark I (ASCC) calculator.
His correspondence in 1944 shows his interest with the work of
not only Aiken but also the electromechanical relay computers
of George Stibitz, and the work by Jan Schilt at the Watson Scientific
Computing Laboratory at Columbia University. By the latter years
of World War II von Neumann was playing the part of an executive
management consultant, serving on several national committees,
applying his amazing ability to rapidly see through problems to
their solutions. Through this means he was also a conduit between
groups of scientists who were otherwise shielded from each other
by the requirements of secrecy. He brought together the needs
of the Los Alamos National Laboratory (and the Manhattan Project)
with the capabilities of firstly the engineers at the Moore School
of Electrical Engineering who were building the ENIAC, and later
his own work on building the IAS machine. Several "supercomputers"
were built by National Laboratories as copies of his machine.

Postwar von Neumann concentrated on the development of the Institute
for Advanced Studies (IAS) computer and its copies around the
world. His work with the Los Alamos group continued and he continued
to develop the synergism between computers capabilities and the
needs for computational solutions to nuclear problems related
to the hydrogen bomb.

Any computer scientist who reviews the formal obituaries of John
von Neumann of the period shortly after his death will be struck
by the lack of recognition of his involvement in the field. His
Academy of Sciences biography, written by Salomon Bochner [1958],
for example, includes but a single, short paragraph in ten pages
- "... in 1944 von Neumann's attention turned to computing
machines and, somewhat surprisingly, he decided to build his own.
As the years progressed, he appeared to thrive on the multitudinousness
of his tasks. It has been stated that von Neumann's electronic
computer hastened the hydrogen bomb explosion on November 1, 1952."
Dieudonné [1981] is a little more generous with words but
appears to confuse the concept of the stored program concept with
the wiring of computers: "Dissatisfied with the computing
machines available immediately after the war, he was led to examine
from its foundations the optimal method that such machines should
follow, and he introduced new procedures in the logical organization,
the "codes" by which a fixed system of wiring could
solve a great variety of problems."!

From the point of view of von Neumann's contributions to the field
of computing, including the application of his concepts of mathematics
to computing, and the application of computing to his other interests
such as mathematical physics and economics, perhaps the most comprehensive
is by Herman Goldstine [1972]. There has been some criticism of
Goldstine's perspective since he personally was intimately involved
in von Neumann's computing activities from the time of their chance
meeting on the railroad platform at Aberdeen in 1944[2] through
their joint activities at the Institute for Advanced Studies in
developing the IAS machine.

There is no doubt that his insights into the organization of machines
led to the infrastructure which is now known as the "von Neumann Architecture".
However, von Neumann's ideas were not along those lines originally;
he recognized the need for parallelism in computers but equally
well recognized the problems of construction and hence settled
for a sequential system of implementation. Through the report
entitled First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC [1945], authored
solely by von Neumann, the basic elements of the stored program
concept were introduced to the industry. A retrospective examination
of the development[3] of this idea reveals that the concept was
discussed by J. Presper Eckert, John Mauchly, Arthur Burks, and
others in connection with their plans for a successor machine
to the ENIAC. The "Draft Report" was just that, a draft,
and although written by von Neumann was intended to be the joint
publication of the whole group. The EDVAC was intended to be the
first stored program computer, but the summer school at the Moore
School in 1946 there was so much emphasis in the EDVAC that Maurice
Wilkes, Cambridge University Mathematical Laboratory, conceived
his own design for the EDSAC, which became the world's first operational,
production, stn2ed-program computer.

In the 1950's von Neumann was employed as a consultant to review proposed and ongoing advanced technology projects. One
day a week, von Neumann "held court" at 590 Madison
Avenue, New York. On one of these occasions in 1954 he was confronted
with the FORTRAN concept; John Backus remembered von Neumann
being unimpressed and that he asked "why would you want more
than machine language?" Frank Beckman, who was also present,
recalled that von Neumann dismissed the whole development as "but
an application of the idea of Turing's `short code'." Donald
Gilles, one of von Neumann's students at Princeton, and later
a faculty member at the University of Illinois, recalled in the
mid-1970's that the graduates students were being "used"
to hand assemble programs into binary for their early machine
(probably the IAS machine). He took time out to build an assembler,
but when von Neumann found out about he was very angry, saying
(paraphrased), "It is a waste of a valuable scientific computing
instrument to use it to do clerical work."

Von Neumann's contributions have been so widespread and so enduring
because of his attitude towards his innovations. The foundations
of his work were laid in the "First Draft of a Report on
the EDVAC," written in the spring of 1945 and distributed
to the staff of the Moore School of Engineering (engineering school
of the University of Pennsylvania where the EDVAC was originally
developed) in late June. It presented the first written description
of the stored program concept and explained how a stored program
computer process information.

The report organized the computer system into four main parts:
the Central Arithmetical unit (CA), the Central Control unit
(CU), the Memory (M), and the Input/Output devices (IO). The
CA was to carry out the four basic arithmetic operations and perhaps
higher arithmetical functions such as roots, logarithms, trigonometric
functions, and their inverses. The CU was to control the proper
sequencing of operations and make the individual units act together
to carry out the specific task programmed into the system. The
M was to store both numerical data (initial boundary values, constant
values, tables of fixed functions) and numerically coded instructions.
And the IO unit(s) were to serve as the user's interface into
the computer.

Von Neumann was interested in presenting a "logical"
description of the stored program computer rather than an engineering
description. He was concerned with the overall structure of a
computing system, the abstract parts that comprise it, the functions
of each part, and how the parts interact to process the information.
The specific materials or design of the implementation of the
parts was not pertinent to his analysis. Any technology that
meets the functional specifications can be used with no effect
on his results. For instance, a person could take the place of
the CC, a piece of paper the M, a calculator the CA, the keys
and display of the calculator the I/O, resulting in a complete
'computer.'

Von Neumann's contributions to computer design were so wide spread
not only because of his brilliance but also because of his attitudes.
He was less concerned with patents and patent law then he was
with spreading information about his innovations. Starting with
his "First Draft" and continuing throughout his work
in computers, von Neumann openly shared his thoughts and theories
with anyone that was interested, including competitors. He openly
and freely distributed his papers and gave talks on his latest
ideas, changing the course of computers that were under development
as his ideas evolved. Manufacturers went from building an EDVAC
clone to building an EDSAC clone to building an IAS clone all
on the basis of von Neumann's ideas.

His contributions endure even today: his basic architectural
design can easily be recognized in the most advanced of today's
computers.